Quadriga

The Nova Scotia court that is overseeing the Quadriga morass ordered the start to bankruptcy proceedings, which could lead to the liquidation of assets and settlement of claims.

The court order came in response to a report from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm that was appointed as a monitor. In the report, the firm said, “Given the present circumstances, the possibility that Quadriga will restructure and emerge from [bankruptcy] protection appears remote.”

Separately, news reports are tying Gerald Cotton with Liberty Reserve, a currency that was shut down by U.S. law enforcement in 2013 for its alleged connection to money laundering.

Reddit users claim QuadrigaCX withdrawals came from other exchanges.

Events continue to unfold in the Quadriga saga.  Quadriga is a crypto exchange that was run by a 30-year-old Canadian named Gerald Cotten who allegedly died in India in December.  His widow alleges that the exchange was run by Cotten from a single encrypted laptop for which no one has the password. Consequently, about 115,000 customers of the exchange cannot access their funds, totaling more than $140 million, according to an article on NDTV.com.

Here’s the latest:

The law firms appointed by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to represent Quadriga’s customers have a established a committee of users who will help the lawyers represent others who were affected by Quadriga’s shutdown.  The seven member committee includes a banker, an engineer and an economic policy adviser.

News outlets are reporting that Quadriga co-founder Michael Patryn was formerly known as Omar Dhanani who had spent time in federal prison in the United States on charges of conspiracy to commit credit-and-bank card fraud in 2005. Dhanani was an operator of shadowcrew.com, a now defunct marketplace for trafficking stolen credit and bank card numbers. Dhanani also admitted guilt in 2007 in California to separate criminal cases for burglary, grand larceny and computer fraud, according to Bloomberg.  Patryn was deported to Canada, where he became involved in cryptocurrency and later co-founded Quadriga with Cotten.

Ernst & Young, the court-appointed accounting firm that is examining Quadriga reported its discovery that the cold wallets that Quadriga is known to have used were empty, leaving open the question of what happened to more than a hundred million dollars in funds deposited by Quadriga customers.